by Jill Lepore
7Samuel Green, ed., Diary of Increase Mather, March, 1675-December, 1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson & Son, 1900), 18.
8Whenever it is possible to identify the native people involved in a particular event I will refer to individuals by name and to groups by affiliation—Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, Mohawk, etc. Unfortunately, the sources do not always provide that information, and in its absence, I will generally use “Algonquians,” “Indians,” and “natives.” (I have tried to avoid using “tribe,” since it remains a contested term.) To avoid confusion, I have generally not used the names of smaller groups if they are more easily identified as members, usually both ethnically and politically, of larger ones (e.g., “Pokanokets” refers to Wampanoags living in the Mount Hope area, but I use simply “Wampanoags”). Since most coastal populations were devastated by diseases early in the seventeenth century, evidence about prewar groups is varied, and since some smaller groups either died out or merged with others in the early decades of contact, reconstructing political divisions on the eve of King Philip’s War is tentative. By far the best source for further information is Bert Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” HNAI 15:160-76. Readers may benefit from a few clarifications: some scholars have used “Nipmuck” and “Massachusett” interchangeably, though possibly without cause; Niantics are closely related to Narragansetts, though the former remained largely neutral during the war; Pawtuckets are also called Penacooks and are occasionally subsumed under the broader group, Massachusett, as are the more western Pocumtucks; “Christian Indians” is the term used to refer to Algonquian converts, the great majority of whom were Massachusett or Pawtucket; and “Penobscots” refers to eastern Abenakis who remained in their homelands after King Philip’s War.
9Melvoin has convincingly argued that moving the line of English settlement toward the coast was, in fact, the Algonquian strategy (New England Outpost, 108-11). Webb argues that “Per-capita incomes in New England did not recover their 1675 levels until 1775. … A century of dependence on England would be required to recover the physical basis of New England’s independence” (1676, 243).
10Scholarship on colonial writings about King Philip’s War includes, most notably, Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600—1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 78—93.
11The most valuable recent works on colonial identity are John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); the essays in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Jack P. Greene’s important collection of essays, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). The idea that colonists in America defined themselves in opposition to the Indians they met there, however, has a history that predates the more recent interpretations of scholars such as Canup. Among the most influential of these earlier works are Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). Powerful earlier works on the relationship between Puritan and American identity include Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939) and Sacvan Berkovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975). Recent scholarship has placed this development within the broader context of the Atlantic world and ideas about language. As Eric Cheyfitz has written,
For England, the initial period of expansion into the Atlantic and Caribbean regions … corresponds, as it did for England’s European competitors, with a powerful surge in the formation of a national identity. The formation of this identity, as writers of the time instruct us, was particularly dependent on the formation of a national language. The articulation of ideas about such a language registers acutely how volatile definitions of the native and the foreign were at the time, when the line between internal and external frontiers was not nearly as clear-cut as it is in the political schemes of today (The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 95-96).
12Bernard Bailyn has called the British North American colonies “the exotic far western periphery, a marchland of the metropolitan European culture system” (The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986], 112-31), a perspective I have found useful to understanding the colonists’ keen sense of their distance from Europe, but my discussion of seventeenth-century New England is also informed by Richard White’s persuasive arguments about a frontier space he calls “the middle ground.” “The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. It is a place where many of the North American subjects and allies of empires lived. It is the area between the historical foreground of European invasion and occupation and the background of Indian defeat and retreat” (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], x).
13William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, “Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 15.
14Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
15According to Frederick Jackson Turner,
At the Adantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier…. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older set-dements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History [New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1920], 1-38).
Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin argue that Turner’s “most compelling argument about the frontier was that it repeated itself” (“Becoming West,” 6).
16At the most literal level, Russell Bourne has recently argued that the most commonly accepted end point for the war, Philip’s death in August 1676, is inaccurate, since the war continued in Maine and western New England (Bourne, Red Kings Rebellion, 205-9). Richard Slotkin has argued that “the Indian wars proved to be the most acceptable metaphor for the American experience” and that King Philip’s War was “an archetype of all the wars which followed” (Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 68, 79).
17Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western Americana,” in Under an Open Sky, 168. Limerick further argues, “Filled with people using written words to justify, promote, sell, entice, cover up, evade, defend, deny, congratulate, persuade, and reassure, western history puts a premium on the critical evaluation of words.”
18“From its beginnings the imperialist mission is, in short, one of translation: the translation of the ‘other’ into the terms of the empire, the prime term of which is ‘barbarian,’ or one of its variations such as ‘savage,’ which, ironically, but not without a precise politics, also alienates the other from the empire” (Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism, 112). Other important literature on the intellectual and linguistic consequences of the encounter includes Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991); Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); Karen Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1495-1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).
19Quoted in Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 1. Hulme writes that language is indeed the “perfect instrument of empire” because it masks economic exploitation with a colonial discourse of difference: “The topic of land is dissimulated by the topic of savagery, this move being characteristic of all narratives of the colonial encounter.” He defines “colonial discourse” as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment and management of colonial relationships, an ensemble that could combine the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents … with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels” (2-3).
20Perry Miller argued that New England’s colonists measured themselves against England and that their failure to measure up constituted their chief crisis of identity (Errand into the Wilderness [Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1956, 1984], ch. 1), but I am here arguing that the colonists also measured themselves against the colonial ventures of other European countries, following scholars such as Canny and Pagden.
21See William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558-1660 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1971); and Peter Lake, “Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), 72-106.
22Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 566-68.
23Benedict Anderson has argued that national identity is best understood as an “imagined community” of people sharing traditions and territory. For Anderson, the printed word is central to the construction of imagined communities (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983]). My understanding of nationalism and national identity is also informed by Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991).
24Hubbard, Narrative, 1:15. Discussions of this naming controversy can be found in Drake, “Severing the Ties That Bind Them,” 3-13; and Philip Ranlet, “Another Look at the Causes of King Philip’s War,” NEQ 61 (1988): 80-81, especially n. 3.
25Francis Jennings was the first to suggest “Puritan Conquest” (Invasion of America, 298). Bourne, among others, has suggested “rebellion” (Red King’s Rebellion). James Drake and Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen have both suggested that King Philip’s War is better understood as an Indian civil war, and Drake proposes “Northeast Civil War” as a new name (Drake, “Severing the Ties that Bind Them,” 9; Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646-1730,” NEQ 63 [1990]: 420). While each of these critiques, Drake and Lonkhuyzen especially, offers useful correctives to our understanding of the war, my position is closest to that of Philip Ranlet, who argues in favor of “King Philip’s War,” though our reasoning differs (“Another Look at the Causes,” 80-81).
26“Art the ernest request of Wamsitta, desiring that in regard his father is lately deceased, and hee being desirouse, according to the custome of the natives, to change his name, that the Court would confer an English name upon him, which accordingly they did, and therefore ordered, that for the future hee shalbee called by the name of Allexander Pokanokett; and desireing the same in the behalfe of his brother, they have named him Phillip” (PCR 3:192).
27Hubbard, Narrative, 1:52.
28This connection is corroborated in Farther Brief and True Narration, 4, and Mather, Exhortation, 190.
29Hubbard, Narrative, 1:15-16. (Meanwhile, in a poetic prologue, Benjamin Tompson said Hubbard’s Narrative was “Wrote by exacter Hand than ever took / Historians Pen since Europe we forsook” [Narrative, 1:24].)
30Mather, Brief History, 36.
31Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons; reprint, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), 486-87.
32Ninigret, possibly the most powerful sachem in southern New England, actually became an important ally of the English during the war, even offering to persuade the Mohawks not to ally with Philip. See Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk, 112-16; and, more broadly, Timothy J. Sehr, “Ninigret’s Tactics of Accommodation—Indian Diplomacy in New England, 1637-1675,” Rhode Island History 36:1 (May 1977): 43-53. His service may partly explain why his portrait came to be painted. In 1669, however, Ninigret may have plotted with Philip to plan the war (RICR 2:266), and some evidence indicates that he was sympathetic with Algonquians who fought against the English.
33The note read, in part, “we care not though we have war with you this 21 years.” Noah Newman copied the note out in his letter to John Cotton, March 14, 1676, Curwen Papers, AAS.
34Philip to Governor Prince, n.d., MHSC, ser. 1, 2:40.
35For Philip’s mark, see, e.g., PCR 12:237; 4:26; 5:79. Philip’s brother Alexander at times signed with an “A” and at other times signed with an “M” (possibly an upside-down “W”), favoring his Algonquian name “Wamsutta,” or an earlier Algonquian name, “Moonanam” (Ebenezer Peirce, Indian Biography and Genealogy [1878; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972], 240, 210, Early Records of the Town of Providence [Providence, 1892]:5:283). My contention that Philip probably knew the alphabet is based on evidence that John Sassamon attempted to teach him to read, as I discuss in Chapter 1.
36Quoted in Hugh Amory, First Impressions: Printing in Cambridge, 1639—1989 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 41. On Algonquian naming practices, see also William Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 46; Bragdon, Native Peoples, 170.
37William Scranton Simmons, Cautantowwit’s House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), 58. The recent claim that Philip was actually Massasoit’s grandson, not his son (Betty Groff Schroeder, “The True Lineage of King Philip [Sachem Metacom]” NEHGR 144 [1990]: 211-14), appears to be mistaken, and based primarily on Nathaniel Saltonstall’s own error (Present State, 26).
38In the summer of 1676 the Christian Indian Jacob Muttamakoog wrote to John Eliot and others, “my wonder concerning Philip, but his name is _____ Wewesawamit” (emphasis in original; the letter is printed in True Account, 6). Philip was also occasionally referred to as “Philip Keitasscot,” but James Drake has astutely argued that “‘Keitasscot’ is simply a variation on the Massachusett word ‘ketahsoot,’ meaning king or sachem.” (“Severing the Ties That Bind Them,” 8). Drake has further suggested that Wewesawamit, or Wewasowannett, may also be a title rather than a name, though I have found no evidence to that effect. Ranlet rejects renaming the conflict “Wewesawamit’s (or Wewasowannett’s) War” for other reasons (“Another Look at the Causes,” 80).
39This romantic image of Philip is discussed in Chapter 8. But see, for example, John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Metacom,” The Ladies Magazine 3 (1830): 58; or John August Stone’s 1829 play about King Philip’s War, in which Philip is called “Metamora.” When an English ambassador addresses Metamora as “Philip,” he fiercely corrects him, “Philip! I am the Wampanoag chief, Metamora” (Stone, “Metamora; or, the Last of the Wampanoags: An Indian Tragedy in Five Acts as played by Edwin Forrest,” in Metamora and Other Plays, ed. Eugene R. Page [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1941], 17). In John Brougham’s parody of Stone’s play, Metamora’s reply to being called “Philip” is “What mean ye by Philip, you rude dogs? I’m Metamora, chief of the Pollywogs” (Metamora; or, the Last of the Pollywogs [New York: Samuel French, n.d.], 8).
40Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, xxv.
41Scarry, The Body in Pain, 61.
42When quoting from other scholars’ edited reprints of seventeenth-or eighteenth-century narratives of King Philip’s War, however, I have generally deferred to their editorial standards, which, on the whole, tend to modernize the text more thoroughly than my own. This is especially true of one of the major modern collections of such narratives, So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1676-1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James Folsom (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978) but since it is also the most easily available to readers, I have chosen to cite from it directly.
43Hubbard, Narrative, 1:15.
Prologue • THE CIRCLE
1Hubbard, Narrative, 2:63-64. This scene is briefly analyzed in John Canup’s important monograph Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 192-93. For a very similar account of an Indian torture scene before the war see John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, Made during the Years 1638, 1663 (London, 1675), 148-49.